Leith Kino and Cinetopia unite for folk horror film festival
The inaugural Fiends In The Furrows festival will spook Leith this April
Springtime is getting a little spookier in Leith with the introduction of Fiends In The Furrows, a folk horror film festival organised by community cinema mavens Leith Kino and Cinetopia. The pop-up outdoor and indoor screenings and events will take place from Thursday 23 – Sunday 26 April at a variety of venues across Leith, featuring international and Scottish films that reflect ‘themes of land, folklore, ritual, history, and the tensions between rural and urban ways of life.’
Starting the programme is The Lair Of The White Worm, Ken Russell’s camp homage to Hammer which features game performances from a young Peter Capaldi and Hugh Grant. In a similar vein is The Wicker Man, which subverted Hammer icon Christopher Lee’s charismatic persona to terrifying effect. Also showing in the classics category is Watership Down, the cartoon that scarred a generation of children with its overtly upsetting story about rabbits on a long and death-filled voyage across the countryside.
Relatively newer film picks for the festival include M Night Shyamalan’s The Village, the story of an isolated countryside village that, while critically divisive in its day, has been reappraised as a superior entry in Shyamalan’s bait-and-switch genre experiments. The Last Sacrifice, a documentary from 2024, charts the real-life witchcraft killings that inspired The Wicker Man.
Rounding off the festival is two examples of Mark Jenkin’s chilling work, starting with Enys Men, about a woman trapped on a secluded island, and concluding with his latest film Rose Of Nevada (pictured above), about a missing boat that mysteriously reappears in the old harbour of a Cornish village.
More events are set to be announced, including multiple screenings at Leith Depot and a series of workshops, talks, and events celebrating Leith’s vibrant local artistic and creative community. Both Leith Kino and Cinetopia have been leading lights of community cinema initiatives across Edinburgh. We spoke to them both for a feature on community cinemas in 2025, writing: ‘Myriad screenings take place unnoticed across the central belt in small, interesting venues, maintaining the legacy of film as an egalitarian medium (it’s with good reason that the nascent years of the moving image invited comparisons to the Tower Of Babel). Leith Kino, Cinetopia and Hurdy Gurdy Film Club (along with Matchbox Cine, Take One Action, the venues participating in the Local Cinema Network, Borscht Film Club, and more) are a small selection of many individuals ensuring that the spirit of film remains intact.’ Read the full article.
Fiends In The Furrows, various venues, Edinburgh, Thursday 23 – Sunday 26 April.